Does Flathead Valley Community College Exist?

by Ed Berry

On April 16 at 8 am, I asked the Executive Secretary several questions. It is now the 5th business day since I asked my questions and no one has answered the following fundamental questions about the FVCC:

• Are the FVCC By Laws available for review along with the minutes?
• When was today’s FVCC formally organized?
• How is the FVCC formally listed with the Secretary of State?
• Since the most recent Trustee minutes on the FVCC website is for March 14, 2011, have there been any other Trustee meetings since March 14, 2011?

Given that the By Laws govern all the actions and meetings conducted by the trustees, and they cannot be produced within 4 business days, one must assume that no trustee has read them. If so, then the present Board of Trustees is incompetent, has not followed the By Laws, and therefore the whole Board must be fired for acting improperly.

Given that no one can tell me when and under what name the FVCC was formally organized within 4 business days, the present trustees must be fired and replaced. They are incompetent to run a board of trustees.

(When I ran C-corporations, I could produce these critical documents within one minute. The incumbent trustees are looking more and more like an incompetent, insider social club and not like a professional, qualified board properly caring for a taxpayer investment.)

Here is an audit report for FVCC and nowhere does it contain answers to any question above.

Given that no one will admit to any Board meetings since March 14, 2011, then the board is illegally operating in secrecy.

The rumors on the street are that Chairman Nystuen called an urgent, secret trustee meeting on the morning of April 8. This is illegal and cannot be justified by By Laws which have not been found.

I challenge Chairman Nystuen as follows:

1. To acknowledge or deny that he held a board meeting on the morning of Friday, April 8, on the college campus.

2. To tell the public in a comment below exactly the purpose of the secret meeting and what was discussed.

3. To open the books of Glacier Bank to reveal all the transaction of Glacier Bank with FVCC including every past and present loan to any project related to the college, interest made on accounts for student loans, etc.

4. To demonstrate that he has no conflict of interest with his position as a trustee of FVCC and his position as President of Glacier Bank.

Lacking a full, proper and timely response to these challenges, I call upon Chairman Nystuen and any trustee who has cooperated with him in this secret meeting of April 8 to resign from the Board of Trustees.